Virtuoso Villa

Long before anyone thought of building trophy houses, one man changed forever the concept of how high, given the money, the standards should be. Five hundred years after the birth of Andrea Palladio, Gully Wells explores his work in a corner of Italy endowed with a cluster of masterpieces

In 1792, Thomas Jefferson drew up plans for a new President's House in Washington, D.C. The design, like its architect, was elegant and innovative: a perfect cube, with four identical porticoes surrounding a circular domed rotonda. Butas so often happens in Washington, then as noworiginality
and brilliance were regarded with some suspicion, and the place Jefferson moved into nine years later was not the one he had designed. However, he never forgot his dream house, and once he'd finished with the presidency, he resurrected the blueprint and it became the inspiration for Monticello and for the library at the University of Virginia, buildings that represent both the apotheosis of neoclassical beauty and Jefferson's architectural genius. But who was Jefferson's inspiration? Who would Jefferson have regarded as the real genius?

According to a letter written by a Colonel Isaac Coles, dated February 23, 1816: "With Mr. Jefferson I conversed at length on the subject of architecture. Palladio, he said, 'is the Bible. Stick close to it.' " Strong stuff, even from a moderately God-fearing man.

For a stonemason, born five hundred years ago in a small town in the Venetian Republic, Andrea Palladio's impact on Western architecture is of, well, biblical proportions. The British were the first to fall under Palladio's spell, and from there his style spread like pollen all over the ever expanding empire. In the thirteen colonies, from the capitol in Williamsburg, Virginia, to the pediment and pillars of a courthouse in New England, to the double porticoes of a plantation house (like Drayton Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina), the influence of the master was inescapable.

Palladio was a man of the Venetothe Venetian mainland, known to the inhabitants of the lagoon as "terra firma" (although, it was not so firma at the time: The marshy land had to be drained before it could be used for agriculture and built upon). His villa commissions came from the local nobility as well as from patrician Venetian families eager to acquire a place in the country. The happy result, for the twenty-first-century traveler, at least, is that Palladio's masterworks (in all there are seventeen villas, three churches, and one theater) are clustered quite close together in and around Vicenza, Padua, Asolo, and of course Venice.

Poor Mr. Jefferson never actually saw a Palladian building; his knowledge and adoration were based upon Palladio's treatise, The Four Books of Architecture, published in Venice in 1570. Palladio's architectural principles were based upon his study of ancient Roman buildings (see graphic, below). Rome was Palladio's inspiration, but his true genius lay in his ability to adapt the monumental and public style of Roman architecture and make it work on a smaller, domestic scale.

For the modern-day Palladio aficionado, however, books are still the beginning of the journey, and so last spring I made a visit to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue (a flight of steps sweeps up to a massive portico, with its six pillars and pedimentan homage to you know who), and settled down with a pile of books, a detailed map of the Veneto, and a red pen, which I used to mark every single Palladian building and its location. After that, it was just a question of connecting the dots.

Even before I arrived in the Veneto last summer, I'd heard from friends in Rome about the sale of the Villa Emo. It was a tragedy, a scandal, an outrage. From a distance (both geographical and social), it was hard to grasp the depth of feeling that this not-so-simple real estate transaction had provoked. But then again, most of us aren't about to sell a house that has been in our family for half a millennium. I'd read the story of how the twenty-seven-year-old Leonardo Emo had commissioned Palladio to build him a villa on his estate in Fanzolo, about thirty miles north of Venice, on the occasion of his marriage to Cornalia Grimani in 1565. Leonardo died young, at fifty-four, in one of the horrendous plagues that swept through Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, and in his will, he gave his wife permission to sell any property if she had to, adding, "but I beg that no part of the villa in Fanzolo be sold." Here was a man in love with a house. For almost five hundred years, his request was honoreduntil the present Count Emo decided that he could no longer afford the upkeep (he'd tried opening a restaurant in one wing and guest rooms in another) and sold it to a bank. The family had attempted to reason with him, had offered to buy it from him, but the deed had been done. And so, to see what the fuss was all about, this was the villa I decided to visit first.

Immediately, I noticed the elegant simplicity of the villa's facade. It is a dignified, masculine house, almost without any detail apart from the pediment, which sits on four gigantic Doric pillars at the top of what you'd expect to be a flight of steps. But as I got closer I saw that, instead of steps, I was about to walk up a broad, two-tiered stone ramp. Why, I wondered, did Palladio do this? Maybe it was an equestrian ramp that would allow riders to dismount at the front door? Or possibly it was a place to dry grain? Or to roll barrels up into the house? Or, most likely, he just wanted to design a spectacular ceremonial entrance to the villa. And if that was his intention, boy did he succeed. I stood at the top of the ramp, looked back down at the gardens and beyond them to the endless fields bordered by poplars shivering in the breeze, and way in the distance I saw a sliver of water shining like mercury in the sunlight.

For all their neoclassical grandeur, these villas were really part of working farms, not unlike the plantations of the antebellum South. The main house at the Villa Emo, with its exuberant frescoes, trompe l'oeil doorways, and sky-high ceilings, was obviously intended for entertaining (and blowing the minds of) visitors, but what about the two long arcaded wings (barchessa) that extend from each side? Aesthetically, they are the ideal balance to the central cube, with their perfectly proportioned square dovecotes at each end. But if you look at them more closely, you realize that with their lack of decoration and height, they are really just elongated barns. The Emos were one of the oldest and richest families in Venice, but by the beginning of the sixteenth century, no longer content with their palazzo in the city, they were eager to acquire a country estate in the Veneto. Wheat and millet were the traditional crops of this part of Italy, but Leonardo Emo introduced the cultivation of granturco (corn)a far more profitable staple, which incidentally led to the invention of polenta.

In addition to the Villa Emo, I chose to visit the two villas where I had introductions to the owners (Villa Cornaro and La Malcontenta) plus the incomparable Rotonda.

Some people come by their Palladian villas the same way they acquire their aquiline noses or their exuberant Titian locks: It's all part of that crapshoot called inheritance. Others pick up a copy of the real estate section of The New York Times. Carl and Sally Gable had been thinking of retiring to New Hampshire, but then they saw the ad. And then they saw the pictures, and they started reading all the books I'd been reading, and they came to see the villa, and . . . they fell in love. Who wouldn't. The Villa Cornaro is remarkable for two things: its magnificent two-story projecting portico and its location right on the main drag of Piombino Dese, which can truthfully be described as one of the more unattractive villages in Italy. It straggles around, without any coherent plan or center, with a few dusty cafés and a charmless church. All the other important Palladian villas either are surrounded by rolling green fields, or are perched on hilltops, or sit by the side of a river (complete with weeping willows), but the Cornaro is so confident of its own magnificence that it just stands there, a devastatingly handsome giant surrounded by mongrels and pygmies. With no room for the elongated barchesse of the villas Emo and Barbaro, Palladio took the "skyscraper" route and built upward, designing the famous huge double portico that dominates the facade of the house to this day.

And the odd thing is that the moment I walked into the villa to meet its owners, the Gables, I suddenly felt myself almost involuntarily standing up straight, holding my shoulders back, in a vain attempt to measure up to the sublime beauty of my surroundings. "It is strange living here," Sally Gable agreed. "We have been entrusted with something so extraordinary that you can never take it for granted. You have to treat a building like this with great respect, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun, too."

We wandered into the sala, or hallalways the largest room in any Palladian villawhere we were surrounded by larger-than-life-size statues of generations of Cornaros, ranging from the beautiful Queen Caterina, who had delivered the island of Cyprus to the Venetian Republic through her marriage to James II, king of Cyprus. But then we moved on to the dining room, where clouds of stucco putti cavorted across the walls and ceiling, and Sally told me the story of how in the 1950s, when the villa had been a church nursery school, the nuns had "cleaned up" the statues, emasculating the poor boys. But the Gables haven't lost hope: Only the other day they found Queen Caterina's long-lost finger, hidden away behind her skirt, so they are convinced that there must be a cache of miniature penises somewhere, waiting to be re-attachedif they could just find them.

For all its splendor, the Villa Cornaro was, of course, a real house where real people lived their complicated, happy, messy lives. But the thing to keep in mind with houses like these is that there were two parallel sets of lives going on simultaneously: the family downstairs, and an army of servants and laborers squeezed into the atticalong with the grain (and the uninvited rats) that was stored there after the harvest. Sally and I climbed slowly up a small circular stone staircase (Palladio's interior staircases are always hidden away in order not to disturb the strict symmetry of his design) and arrived in a huge series of rooms right up under the eaves, where servants, grain, and rats would have existed in cozy proximity. And there, etched upon the walls, were strange drawings of young men in fancy plumed hats and buckled shoes, some cartoonish ducks that could have been Donald's Italian ancestors, and rough scribbles of (much) larger versions of the putti's missing bits. Graffiti that was half a millennium old and yet still as fresh and crude as the day some bored servant had decided to amuse himself by decorating a corner of his "room."

If the site at Piombino Dese had been a challenge, and most of his other villas were part of working farms, Palladio was freed of all such mundane constraints at La Rotonda. Here he was presented with the ideal site as well as a patron, Paolo Almerico, a man of the Church. The natural beauty of the hilltop site, with its views on all four sides, allowed Palladio to finally execute a design that he'd been playing around with all his life: a circle enclosed in a cube with four identical porticoes, each facing a different but equally stunning vista. As with most brilliant ideas, it was simplicity itself.

There's something strange but also liberating about a house with no front or back or sides. Sure, there is an approach from the road, but who's to say that the portico at the top of the drive is the entrance? So instead of going straight in, I walked slowly around the entire house, soothed and seduced by its supreme confidence and equanimity. When I did finally enter, I found myself in a circular room that stretched all the way up to the dome, where, at the center, I saw an oculus, or "eye," through which streamed the sunshine that illuminated the entire space.

As I wandered through the perfectly proportioned rooms, their open doors precisely aligned so that the eye is drawn along the entire enfilade, I was enchanted, but at the same time I felt that something was missing. And what was missing, of course, was all the warmth and mess and charm of a house that is lived in. Without human contact, houses lose their raison d'être and become magnificent stage sets desperately in need of the strutting, shouting, sweating actors who bring them to life.

When Alvise and Nicolò Foscari asked Palladio to design a villa for them in the late 1550s, they made it clear that they wanted a country palazzo, not some ritzed-up farm. The two brothers, who came from one of Venice's most powerful families, were out to convey a sense of terribilita, shock and awe, and had the financial heft to allow Palladio to produce his first truly grand work. The villa, known as La Malcontenta, stayed in the Foscari family until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1799. Two centuries went by, and then through a bizarre turn of the historical roundabout, Antonio Foscari reacquired his ancestral home in 1973. As a young boy growing up outside Venice during the Second World War, he remembers waiting for the air raids to end so that he and his father could bicycle furiously out along the banks of the Brenta Canal to see if "their" house had survived. As indeed it did, miraculously undamaged, despite the best efforts of the American and German bombers. And now sixty years later, La Malcontenta has been brought back to life.

The villa's massive portico, with its fourteen-foot doorway, faces the Brenta Canal, so that visitors would arrive by boat and be greeted by their hosts standing there, towering above them, as they walked up the two stone staircases at each side. I suppose if I'd had any sense of drama, I too would have chartered a boat, but instead I parked my car outside the gates and strolled with Barbara Foscari along a shady allée toward the entrance. "Yes, it is magnificent, but we have tried to make it intimate," she explained as we walked into the huge cruciform-shaped sala. Every Palladian villa has a central sala which would have been used for entertaining, theatrical performances, weddings, and big parties, but on either side of the sala are sets of rooms that are more intimate in scale. "I think with a house like this, with its frescoes and architectural integrity," Barbara continued, "the furniture needs to be very quiet." So quiet that in one salon I wondered where the sofa began and the fresco ended: The cream-and-red silk stripes seemed to have migrated from one to the other, but this was of course entirely intentional, since the sofa fabric had been woven in Asolo to match the fabric in the wall painting. As we walked through the house together, I kept imagining what it could possibly be like to live surrounded by such beauty. Would you ever just take it for granted and maybe stop noticing it altogether? "Oh no," Barbara said, smiling, "one never gets used to beautyone keeps being surprised and inspired by it."

After a week of total Palladio immersion, I knew what she meant. Surprised and inspired. But also soothed and reassured by the fact that one man could have created a whole world of such profoundly pleasing, rational beauty, reflecting the Renaissance idea of a universe subject to human reason. Disorder and ugliness were banished from his Garden of Eden, and replaced by the pure aesthetic and intellectual delight of La Rotonda's dome, the Villa Cornaro's double portico, the Villa Emo's elegant barchesse, and La Malcontenta's vaulted sala.